


Home Front

by Yeoyou



Series: Battlefield [2]
Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Alternate Universe - World War II, F/M, Nurse/Patient, canon-typical loss of limb, characterisation necessarily differs because of different circumstances (duh), nothing described too graphic but you know ..., period-typical injuries are mentioned, the ship nobody saw coming, there's gonna be sex at some point, things weren't fun back then
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-11
Updated: 2017-03-15
Packaged: 2018-10-02 16:16:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10222298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yeoyou/pseuds/Yeoyou
Summary: Emma Emmerich works as a war-time nurse in London and has to deal with a particularly troublesome patient.--ReadingBattlefieldfirst is advised but not necessary.I should probably clarify that the age gap is NOT like in canon!! It's more like 5 years or something.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> You can thank [mightyscrub](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mightyscrub) and [thelonebamf](http://archiveofourown.org/users/thelonebamf) for more of this ridiculous pairing. Motivation by Stealthy ^^

Emma ran her hands over her crisp uniform, smoothing away any crinkles. She was annoyed at herself for the involuntary show of her nerves but was unable to suppress it. She should have been over that a long time ago. She was a wartime nurse baptised in sweat and blood and worse and yet, every now and then, her childhood shyness reared its head and made her feel gangly and awkward. But hesitation and nervousness were a luxury she couldn't afford in the face of so much pain and suffering. In the face of duties to be performed.

Emma straightened her shoulders, took a deep breath, and approached the bed of Wing-Commander Benedict Miller, recently transferred here and already proving the terror of the ward. He'd managed to bring three different nurses to tears in the last twenty hours. But those had been novices, Emma was not. Head nurse Hale had been impatient, when she'd called for Emma, demanding that she'd better subdue the Commander before he stirred even more trouble. Emma had only nodded.

Failing was not an option. It had never been an option for the ambitious young woman. Whether it was learning as much about mechanical engineering and physics as she could or her training as a nurse: when Emma had chosen a path, she stuck to it.

 

Miller was lying motionless in his bed as Emma reached his side. She was still not quite used to seeing those empty spaces under the blankets where healthy limbs used to be. In the Commander's case, it was his right arm, that was missing, as well as his left leg, which had been amputated just under the knee. The bandages around his eyes made it difficult to see whether he was asleep or not unless he was yelling his head off at any- and everybody. But Emma didn't think he was as she looked down on his reduced form. There was an angry tension in the lines around his lips and the fingers on his left hand twitched restlessly every now and then.

She put the tray down on the bedside table.

“Good evening, Commander Miller, I'm nurse Emmerich and here to help you with your food.”

Miller scowled and growled low in his throat.

“If it's more of that inedible muck, you can shove it up your ass for all I care.”

“Why no! It's the best steak, straight from the last cow of England and prepared by the best cook but if you don't want it, of course I'll take it away.” So far, Emma wasn't very impressed by “Hellmaster” Miller. Apparently he had earned that title not because of his bad manners here but because of his daring manoeuvres with the Spitfire. She'd heard he'd been one of the best pilots in the Royal Air Force until he had been shot down by the Germans.

Well, he wouldn't be flying any more. Emma supposed she should pity him and she would have if he didn't annoy her so much. She had no patience for bullies terrorising her colleagues.

“I'm sure there's enough men here who are less spoilt and who would be happy to have it. People who have been less lucky than you.”

“Lucky?!”

Miller's face transformed into an enraged snarl as he tried to sit up, head swivelling in the direction of her voice.

“Stop that fidgeting.” Emma demanded and grabbed Miller under his left armpit, the other hand steadying his ribs as she helped him to sit up. He was surprisingly light.

Her patient growled only more and tensed up as she touched him but Emma ignored it.

“Yes. Lucky. You've still got half your limbs and your pretty face and once those bandages come off you'll even have most of your eyesight back. Others haven't been so fortunate.”

Miller tried to shove her, getting more furious by the second, spluttering incoherently. Emma slapped his arm away.

“Oh stop that! It's not our fault you were stupid enough to get shot down. We've got other patients who need us much more than you do! So for Christ's sake, calm down and swallow your food like a good boy so I can get back to those who are actually grateful for my help.”

“I guess you get a kick out of that. Does it make you wet? All those weak men whimpering and simpering and adoring you. Calling you their _angel_.” Miller's voice was dripping with venom but since he had at least stopped trying to hit her, Emma didn't care. “Say, you ever let them show you just how _grateful_ they are?”

Emma raised her eyebrow. Tying a bib round Miller's neck, she replied calmly: “You mean if I trade sexual favours for doing my job?” She laughed. “As if I had time for that.”

“You're probably ugly as hell so none of the boys would even want you.”

“If it makes you feel better to think that, by all means. I don't care. For all you know, I could be pretty as Cleopatra or ugly as a drowned rat. It makes no difference to me what you think so if you find comfort in the thought that the person feeding you like a child is ugly, than go for it. And now open your mouth.”

Miller was clearly still fuming. In many ways, those who had been cocky and arrogant before they'd ended up here, were the worst patients. The handsome ones most of all. Everything they had taken for granted, strength, success, the attraction of the opposite sex, was suddenly taken away and left them stranded in No-Man's land. Helpless. They didn't know what they had become and so tried to cling to their anger and bitterness over the unfairness of life.

Emma could understand that and she was not unsympathetic but if it meant that they made her job more difficult than it already was, she had little patience for it.

“Just be glad I'm not feeding you with a straw through a hole in your cheek.” A note of gentleness had crept unbidden into her words and took their sting. But not their truth. She'd seen many garish wounds but none seemed worse than those that distorted a person's face, stealing the very essence of who they had been.

Miller seemed to sober up a little and grunted something that she took for unwilling agreement. She dipped the spoon into the blob the cooks called “mashed potato” but which tasted like papier-mâché, and lightly nudged Miller's lips with it. He opened them reluctantly and grimaced as his taste-buds were assaulted.

“Not steak then,” he mumbled.

“Sorry.”

“Not your fault, I guess.”

Emma hummed, in agreement and surprise, and fed him the next spoonful.

“If it's any consolation, we have to eat the same 'muck'.”

“Not one of the perks of the job, I take it.”

“I'm not sure there are many. Well, apart from being called an 'angel' on a daily basis, of course, and all those sexual favours offered.”

Miller chuckled and those restless fingers on his left hand finally stilled.

He ate the rest of his meal in silence.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Miller's fingers were tapping a restless tattoo onto the wood of the small table while he surveyed the people passing outside the little café. He wasn't quite sure what he felt. It was not dissimilar to the nervousness he had experienced when he'd first started stepping out with girls and yet it was very different, too. Back then, he had been nervous because he hadn't known the girls very well and hadn't been sure how things would go. Now, he knew the woman in question surprisingly well for someone he had never seen.

It troubled him that that was probably the root of the matter. Before the war, before daring bravado and hell fire and the loss of two limbs, he hadn't ever questioned that he'd always whistled after the pretty girls and wasn't interested in the rest. He had been young and good looking and carefree. Of course he had believed that he only deserved the best. And more often than not, he'd also had them in the end. But now he was quite literally only half the man he had been and suddenly looks became much more important.

With a supreme mental effort, he stopped his fingers' tapping and pressed them flat on the hard surface.

He had a quick look around but nobody paid the cripple in the back much heed. He'd become invisible. Or worse, something to pity.

Miss Emmerich had never disclosed anything about her appearance so the only clue he held to how she looked was her age, which she had told him. After a lot of coaxing and guessing on his part. She had preferred to remain shrouded in mystery, somewhere between Cleopatra and the drowned rat. Schroedinger's nurse, she had called it. Even though he still didn't quite understand that particular reference, try as she might to explain it. She could be anything and anyone in his mind as long as he couldn't see her. 

He only knew her hands were small and surprisingly strong. The skin scrubbed raw from washing and disinfecting her hands countless times throughout the day. He only knew her voice, that could be both sharp and gentle but most often mocked him. He had hated her for it in the beginning and then came to understand that it was the only thing dispelling the dark clouds in his mind even for a moment. He had come to, well,  _look_ _forward_ to her visits. Waiting to hear her voice once more. He had only made her laugh once all through that time she had nursed him after his accident and he had carefully tucked away that sound in his memory. 

By the time the bandages had finally come off and his eyesight had gradually returned – though never to full strength – she had been on a visit to her brother and he soon on to other facilities, where he could rest and regain what was left of his strength.

He still wasn't sure whether he was sad or glad that she hadn't been the first person he had seen after his weeks of darkness. It had probably been for the better. His feelings had been in turmoil – there had been happiness of course, because his incarceration in his own mind's dark was over, but there had also been the expected bitterness when he saw the stump of his leg and arm, when he saw his own face in the mirror for the first time and hardly recognised the man staring back at him, who seemed years older than himself. He had been frustrated because seeing meant feeling like he could  _do_ things again, instead of just lying around and waiting, but also realising how hard it was to do anything left-handed. In the dark, he had sometimes imagined that his leg and arm were still there. So long as he didn't move, it didn't make a difference. He could still feel them, after all. But when he had tried to take something with his missing hand for the first time and it had fallen to the floor instead, there was no more hiding. 

Nurse Emmerich would probably have been able to make things better, easier. To comfort him, even though he had never thought he would need a woman's comfort. Not like that. But he had also been glad that she hadn't seen him like that, even though she had seen him worse. She was more familiar with the new Benedict Miller than he was. He didn't want her by his side as he discovered him.

He glanced at the clock on the opposite wall. It was three minutes past twelve. She wasn't that late yet but he felt impatient nevertheless even though it had been his choice to be there early. So that he could hide in the darkest corner of the café, from prying eyes and for the sake of _his_ eyes, still so sensitive to light.

Every time the doorbell jingled, he could feel his gut tying itself into knots. Luckily for him and his entrails, there weren't that many single women entering the café.

When she did arrive, at last, at seven minutes past twelve, he couldn't say that he had known her the moment he saw her. There was no spark of recognition, no sudden knowledge that  _this_ was the woman whose voice followed him everywhere he went. With whom he had shared more letters than he had ever written before his accident – although these were now all typed out agonisingly slowly on a typewriter.

She entered the café, hands balled into nervous fists at her side. He saw her look around, searching, and finding him. He saw the moment of recognition, the instantaneous smile that was checked by worried insecurity seconds later. He saw her take a deep breath before she approached the table and sank into the chair opposite.

Miss Emma Emmerich was mousier than he had expected. Although he couldn't even say what he had thought she looked like. She was pretty in her own way, he supposed, but certainly no Cleopatra. The unassuming brown hair was combed back into a slightly messy bun, small strands of hair sticking out here and there. Her small, boyish frame seemed to consist of an altogether indecent amount of sharp angles. Overworked and underfed. She moved awkward like a gangly teenager. The thing that somehow really took him by surprise, though, where the glasses, perched high on her small, freckled nose.

“It's nice to see you again, Commander,” she said with a smile that wavered a little in the beginning but held the same slightly mocking humour as her voice. A voice that was still so familiar to him even though it had been a while since he'd heard it. And suddenly it all seemed to come together and _of course_ this was the woman who had fed, washed, and berated him, and had held the bitterness at bay.

His lips stretched into a wry grin and he inclined his head.

“Nice to see you for the first time, Miss Emmerich.”

There was silence while she studied him studying her. The easy intimacy of their letters seemed to have belonged to two other people. They were saved by the waitress who came to take their orders. Once she had left them alone again, the strangely unfamiliar familiar woman in front of him moved closer.

“So, better or worse than you imagined?”

While he was still trying to formulate an answer, she added: “You know, just to get the elephant out of the room.”

She shrugged and obviously tried to appear nonchalant and careless but he could sense the nervousness behind that façade.

“The glasses took me by surprise.”

She arched an eyebrow and promptly pushed the article in question back up her nose.

“Although why,” he continued, “I don't know. I should probably have expected them from such a Miss Know-it-all like you.”

She grinned and the sparkle in her eyes lit up her whole face.

“Well, how is anyone to take me seriously without them?”

“I thought nobody was taking you seriously anyway?”

“Touché.”

She sighed and looked him over.

“You look all right. How are you getting on?”

He grimaced. “Shop talk? Really?”

“It's not just my job. But if you don't want to talk about it, fine. Then tell me about Catherine. Or the train ride up to London. And if you want to talk about none of these things, I suppose there's always the weather.”

“Why don't you tell me how you're doing? Is the old dragon Hale still there to terrorise nurses and patients alike?”

She scrutinised his face for a moment – a look that made him almost glad he hadn't had to endure it before. She seemed to dredge up everything in his head and heart at once. The nurse may be pale and small and unassuming at first glance but anyone underestimating her was in for a bad surprise. She hid a razor sharp mind behind those grey eyes.

In the end, the nurse just shrugged and went along with his request. Sparing him any further interrogations for the moment.

He listened while she talked and couldn't get enough of watching her face all the while, noting the way she pushed up her glasses frequently, scrunching up her nose at the incompetence of one of the newer nurses, how her fingers brushed back errant strands of hair. He couldn't remember ever being that fascinated with a face before.

When the tea and scones arrived, she seemed almost glad to have him concentrate on something else for a change.

She poured the weak looking stuff into their cups and, without hesitation, grabbed his scone to cut it in half.

Miller felt anger welling up inside of him, the still fresh bitterness of having to accept help with even the most mundane of tasks. As she started to spread the meagre amount of butter and jam on the scone, he snapped.

“I can do that.”

It came out sharper than intended, but it was true. He had been practising after all.

Miss Emmerich looked up and studied his face but she didn't stop her hands.

“I don't doubt it,” she replied calmly. “But this is faster and more efficient and I'm starved so as much as I'd like to watch your improved left hand coordination ...” She shrugged and pushed the plate with his scone – both sides buttered and spread with jam – over to him before turning her attention to her own scone.

Miller was still fuming but as quickly as his temper had flared, it died down again.

“Sorry,” he said as soon as he trusted his voice again. “I should have realised how hungry you would be.” And that he couldn't expect her to wait for him while he battled the pastry.

“No harm done.” After swallowing the first bite of scone, she added: “I hope?”

He shook his head, watching her inhale her food, and finally closed the fingers of his left hand around his own scone.

“No harm done.”

 


End file.
